Nobody pushed you to use git when you were comfortable with svn? Nobody pushed you to use Docker when you were comfortable running bare metal? Nobody pushed you to write unit tests when you were comfortable not? Nobody pushed you to use CSS for layout when you were happy using tables?

Some of those are before your time, but: The only time you don't get pushed to use new technologies is when a) nothing is changing and the industry is stagnant, or b) you're ahead of the curve and already exploring the new technology on your own.

Otherwise, everyone always gets pushed into using the new thing when it's good.

I'm the same as you: I don't really care about this stuff. Given what we know about the start of these AI endeavors (torrenting/scraping the whole internet and training on it) then running their software seems like a liability. Is it pasting code verbatim that falls under an incompatible license? Is it training on my codebase? Why would I want to depend on this very compute intensive, cloud hosted tool?

At least with other advancements in our field like git, Docker, etc., they're made with a local-first mindset (e.g. your git repos can live anywhere and same with your docker images)

You don’t have to, of course, but you probably will if you want to be competitive in a professional capacity in the future.

Not doing so seems a bit like a farmer ploughing fields and harvesting crops by hand while seeking to remain competitive with modern machinery, surely?

I've seen a lot of developer tooling change and evolve over the course of my career, but with AI it was the first time I've seen people in non-technical managerial positions trying to force the engineers to make a switch. It was extremely bizarre.

I think the standing assumption is that most of us take pride and enjoyment in being good at our craft - and some of us even want to be great at it. That means understanding all the tools at our disposal - to see if they are useful or not.

If that is not interesting to you I think that’s a totally fine choice, but you’re getting a lot of pushback from people who have made a different choice.

It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and "uncertainty" they talk about is just projecting.

That's probably true on some level for some evangelists, but it's probably just as true that some people who are a bit scared of AI read every positive post about it as some sort of propaganda trying to change their mind.

Sometimes it's fine to just let people talk about things they like. You don't know what camp someone is in so it's good to read their post as charitably as possible.

Your work will eventually be driven by the same economics as the industry as a whole, project estimates 12 months from now will be done based on how long it takes a dev with full LLM backing, not your current speed. Then you need to be prepared to work at that speed.

You don’t have to! Enjoy it! Just don’t bank on getting paid for it indefinitely. That’s the aspect of it that’s causing so much consternation.

> Why do I _have_ to give it a go?

Because your boss is going to want you capable of using these things effectively even as shortly as 1-2 years from now? If not them, then their boss.